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Chapter 14 - The Epistemic Disobedience of Latinx Shakespeares

from Part IV - Transcreating

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2025

Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

This chapter attends to contemporary Latinx adaptations of early modern English drama and theater to theorize how a hegemonic playwright such as Shakespeare can be adapted as Latinx theater Cuban-American playwright Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s 2019 play, The Island in Winter or, La Isla en Invierno (an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale), serves as a case study of the multimodal process of transnational theatrical bilanguaging, or the experience of living between languages. I argue that the currency of adapting Shakespeare for Latinx today is in the possibility of moving from a historical memory that recolonizes Latinx to an active site of Latinx temporality as worldmaking. Trujillo’s The Island in Winter as a process of epistemic disobedience disenfranchises anti-Black racism from theatrical representations of Cuban culture by integrating African Indigenous rituals into one of Shakespeare’s stories. It is through this process that cultural narratives are redrawn and reenacted, while gaps in the Western canon are exposed.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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